Professor John Guillory Boeken

"Since its initial publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the compilation and codification of what was once known, unassailably, as the literary canon. Cultural Capital challenges the putative objectivity of aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and literary knowledge on which "culture" had long been based. Now, as the "crisis of the canon" has evolved into the "crisis of humanities," Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more relevant and urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this new edition: "Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation-these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.""--

Part One: The Formation and Deformation of Literary Study -- Institution of Professions -- Professing Criticism -- Critique of Critical Criticism -- Part Two: Organizing Literature: Foundations, Antecedents, Consequences -- Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities -- The Postrhetorical Condition -- Two Failed Disciplines: Belles Lettres and Philology -- The Location of Literature -- The Contradictions of Global English -- Part Three: Professionalization and Its Discontents -- 9 On the Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education -- Evaluating Scholarship in the Humanities -- Composition and the Demand for Writing -- The Question of Lay Reading -- Conclusion: Ratio Studiorum.